“I feel like a guinea pig, but I understand why they did it,” explained the former Louisiana governor.   Roemer said he was grateful for the opportunity to seek the organization’s presidential nomination — a prize that originally meant ballot access in all fifty states and the District of Columbia.

A candidate needed 10,000 “clicks” of support (with a minimum of at least 1,000 in each of ten states) to qualify for the Americans Elect online primary.  Some candidates, such as former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson and Boston University professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff, needed five times that number to qualify.  Roemer, who has been campaigning for the presidency almost non-stop for seventeen straight months, was the closest to reaching that elusive goal, garnering more than 6,300 supporters by early Thursday afternoon.

Despite his disappointment at today’s development, Roemer has no immediate plans to end his quest for the presidency.

“We’ll take a couple of days to reassess the campaign,” said Roemer, 68, who has steadfastly maintained that he was “running to win.”  The Harvard-educated banker and small businessman said that he hasn’t ruled out the possibility of putting together a coalition candidacy that would include the nearly-defunct Reform Party and a number of other ballot-qualified third parties around the country.

The Reform Party, founded in the aftermath of Ross Perot’s 1992 independent bid for the White House, has encouraged Roemer to stay in the hunt.

“It is our hope that, regardless of what happens with Americans Elect, Gov. Roemer will continue to seek the Reform Party’s nomination,” party chairman David Collison told Uncovered Politics last week.   “We believe that having more credible choices at our nominating convention, and more choices at the ballot box, are critical steps to change the political direction of our nation toward real reform.”

The Reform Party will hold its national convention in Philadelphia Aug. 10-12.

Having secured ballot access in roughly 30 states, and well on track to achieve 50 state access, this announcement is a huge blow to anyone hoping to see a centrist or reform third party ticket emerge…

There is a desire among Delegates and millions of Americans who have supported Americans Elect to see a credible candidate emerge from this process.

However, the rules, as developed in consultation with the Americans Elect Delegates, are clear. As of this week, no candidate achieved the national support threshold required to enter the Americans Elect Online Convention in June. The primary process for the Americans Elect nomination has come to an end.

Americans Elect, from the outset, has been a rules-based process, with the rules publicly available and open to debate by the Delegates. Our key priorities have been to: 1) honor the trust Americans Elect has built with the Delegates and American public; 2) require candidates to earn the nomination by building support among the Americans Elect Delegate community and American voters; and 3) create a basis for a solid future for the Americans Elect movement.

This decision honors these priorities.

Through the efforts of thousands of staffers, volunteers, and leadership, Americans Elect has achieved its operational goals, including:

- Creating a pathway for nationwide ballot access for a balanced presidential ticket unaffiliated with the nominating process of either major party to compete in the 2012 race;
- Building the technological platform for the first nonpartisan secure national online primary at AmericansElect.org;
- Attracting a significant base of more than 4 million supporters, including Delegates, petition signers and volunteers;
- Educating the national and local media on the Americans Elect mission; and
- Finishing an extensive candidate briefing program involving more than 100 potential candidates.

As always, we thank everyone who has helped build this organization and are grateful for the work, efforts, and trust so many people have placed in Americans Elect. We are continuing the Americans Elect mission of creating more choice in our political system, giving candidates unaffiliated with the nominating process of either major party an authentic way to run for office and giving the American people a greater voice in our political process.

Morse’s campaign for the presidency that year was something of a mystery.  Nobody knew for sure why he was running.

“One of the real puzzlers in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination,” wrote a Washington correspondent, “is what Oregon’s Sen. Wayne Morse thinks he’s doing in it.”

Everybody had a theory.  Some believed that he was running to punish his youthful Massachusetts rival for sponsoring the Kennedy-Landrum-Griffin labor legislation, which Morse had voted against.

Some believed he was a stalking horse for Adlai Stevenson — an argument Morse never went out of his way to deny.  “If I wasn’t a candidate,” he said, “I would still be for Stevenson.”

A few observers were convinced that the unpredictable Oregon senator really wanted to occupy the White House and was hoping for a deadlocked convention, a not entirely unimaginable possibility given the crowded Democratic field that included not only Kennedy, but Senators Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, Stuart Symington of Missouri and Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, with the twice-defeated Stevenson — everybody’s favorite Democrat — hovering somewhere in the background, hoping the third time might be a charm.

There were yet others who thought the 59-year-old Oregon lawmaker really had his eye on his party’s vice-presidential nomination.  Morse himself apparently fell in the latter category.

“I’m the guy who says “Yes,” replied Morse when pressed on the vice presidency.  “I think it’s a position of great influence.”

Regardless of his motives, the fearless and highly individualistic Oregonian — a guy who had represented his state in the U.S. Senate as both a Republican and a Democrat — surprised almost everybody when he modestly consented to run for president as a “favorite-son” candidate a few days before Christmas 1959.

“Although I would have preferred not to have been entered in the Oregon race,” he declared, “I shall not run away from a good political fight if it is inevitable.”

Anybody who had been following the professorial politician’s career wouldn’t have expected anything less.  The prickly Republican-turned-Democrat — a man whose outspoken manner won him enemies in both parties — was born in Wisconsin at the turn of the century.  As a young man, Morse became a disciple of Sen. Robert M. La Follette, a fiery progressive who spent a lifetime crusading for social and economic justice.

A former University of Oregon law professor, in the 1930s Morse was the nation’s youngest law school dean and also earned a well-deserved reputation as a skilled labor arbitrator.

Although sympathetic to the New Deal, Morse was originally elected to the U.S. Senate in 1944 as a Republican and was re-elected in 1950, trouncing his hapless Democratic opponent by more than fifty percentage points.

During the Eisenhower years, Morse — a lean man with a clipped mustache and sharp nose — proved to be a liberal thorn in the side of the Republican administration and later abandoned the party altogether, briefly serving in the U.S. Senate as a man without a party.

When the Eighty-third Congress convened in January 1953, Morse famously caused a ruckus in the Senate chamber by carrying a folding chair, which he intended to place in the center aisle.  “Since I haven’t been given any seat in the new Senate,” he said determinedly, “I decided to bring my own.”

Senate Majority Leader Robert Taft of Ohio immediately stripped the blunt-spoken lawmaker of his choice committee assignments — including his cherished seat on the Labor Committee.  He was seated, instead, on Taft’s “garbage can” committees — Public Works and the District of Columbia.  Morse strongly denounced Taft’s heavy-handed actions.

A few months later, Morse made Senate history by shattering the late “Fighting Bob” La Follette’s eighteen-hour filibuster record by speaking against the Tidelands Oil legislation for twenty-two hours and twenty-six minutes.

Morse changed his party allegiance to the Democrats in 1955, thereby giving the Senate Democrats a one-vote majority.  Lyndon B. Johnson, the new Senate Majority Leader, immediately rewarded the Oregon senator by giving him his choice of committee assignments.

Morse was re-elected to a third Senate term as a Democrat in 1956, defeating his Republican rival by more than 61,000 votes.

The “Tiger of the Senate,” as he was affectionately dubbed, later became an early and consistent critic of the Vietnam War and — along with Alaska’s Ernest Gruening — was one of only two members of the Senate to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964.

Morse’s unexpected candidacy for the Oval Office in 1960 was viewed by many as possible impediment to Senators Kennedy and Humphrey, both of whom were battling for the party’s liberal mantle.  Liberal Democrats feared that the Oregonian’s candidacy would prevent either man from winning the party’s nomination.

Morse was the quintessential poor-man’s candidate, running his campaign for the nation’s highest office on something less than a shoestring.  He spent only $10,000-12,000 in the District of Columbia primary a few weeks earlier, his first foray into the 1960 Democratic primaries.  “I haven’t got anything like the $100,000 that Humphrey spent in Wisconsin or the much-more-than-that Kennedy spent,” he lamented shortly after that state’s April 5 primary.

Making the second of three primary appearances that spring — he lost to Humphrey by a couple of thousand votes in the D.C. primary two weeks earlier — the cantankerous senior senator from Oregon considered himself something of a favorite “step son” in Maryland since he owned and operated a farm there.

He had also hoped to run in his birthplace of Wisconsin, but couldn’t afford to mount a campaign there.

“The press has done quite a job to downgrade me, but I’m used to that,” Morse told a nationally-syndicated columnist shortly before the Maryland primary. “Liberals get it all the time.”

After trouncing Morse in the Maryland primary, Kennedy scored a smashing victory against the Oregon lawmaker in his home state three days later.

The professor-turned-politician nevertheless actively campaigned for the state’s 24 delegates, urging Maryland Democrats to nominate a true liberal and return to the kind of liberalism which Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman stood for.  Kennedy, he asserted, “has a voting record that doesn’t deserve the support of labor, farmers or the little man.”

He also didn’t care for Kennedy’s method of campaigning.  “I’m not a shopping center campaigner or one who walks up and down the street,” sighed Morse.  “I happen to think you should discuss the issues.  You can’t do it as well out on a baby-kissing contest.”

Morse, who clearly lacked JFK’s grace, wit and style, was a heavy underdog in Maryland.  Virtually every leading Democrat in the state was supporting Kennedy.

Despite polling only 17.2 percent of the vote — far below expectations — the renowned maverick wasn’t impressed by the size of Kennedy’s victory and calmly predicted that the winner-loser roles would be reversed in his native Oregon three days later.

He was sorely disappointed.  Out-hustled by his young and energetic rival on his home turf, Morse lost to Kennedy again — this time by a staggering 55,000 votes — thus ending his little-remembered quest for the Democratic presidential nomination.

A number of the eight-term Ohio congressman’s friends and supporters in Bellingham, Olympia and Seattle — many of whom had supported his principled, antiwar campaigns for the White House in 2004 and 2008 — were urging him to consider running in one of the state’s 10 congressional districts before Friday’s filing deadline.

The Ohio congressman had been a frequent visitor to the state and had long toyed with the idea of running there.

Kucinich, whose relatively safe Cleveland-based congressional seat was eliminated due to redistricting, was defeated by fellow Democrat Marcy Kaptur in Ohio’s March 6 primary, losing to the longtime Toledo Democrat by a count of 42,902 to 30,564 in the state’s newly-redrawn 9^th congressional district.

In announcing his decision, the 65-year-old progressive lawmaker said that he believed that he could be more effective outside the halls of Congress.

“After careful consideration and discussions with Elizabeth and my closest friends, I have decided that, at this time, I can best serve from outside the Congress,” wrote Kucinich.   “My commitments to peace, to workers’ rights and to social and economic justice are constant and are not dependent upon holding an office.”

Gary Johnson

Public Policy Polling is out with a new survey today that shows support for former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson goes beyond the rural Western states.

In North Carolina, a potentially pivotal swing state, President Obama leads Mitt Romney by 2-points.  An impressive 6% of voters are backing Johnson and 4% remain undecided.  This poll comes on the heels of another PPP survey showing Johnson at 7% in New Hampshire.

If the candidates for President this year were Democrat Barack Obama, Republican Mitt Romney, and Libertarian Gary Johnson, who would you vote for?

Barack Obama………………………………………… 46%
Mitt Romney……………………………………………. 44%
Gary Johnson …………………………………………. 6%
Undecided………………………………………………. 4%

Johnson polled 12% among registered independents and 8% among voters under the age of 30.  Strangely, perhaps due to a quirk in the polling’s methodology or just a small sample size, Johnson was the favored candidate of 24% of voters who identified themselves as something other than Caucasian or African-American. It seems unlikely that the Libertarian nominee is actually that wildly popular among Hispanics, Asians and other ethnic minorities in the Tar Heel State.

If Johnson can do a bit more than double his current polling numbers over the next few months, he could earn a spot in the national debates.

The firm surveyed 1,163 New Hampshire voters from May 10th to 13th. The margin of error for the survey is +/-2.9%.

If the candidates for President this year were Democrat Barack Obama, Republican Mitt Romney, and Libertarian Gary Johnson, who would you vote for?

Barack Obama…………………………… 51%
Mitt Romney…………………………. 38%
Gary Johnson …………………….. 7%
Undecided……………………… 4%

The survey also reveals that Johnson captures 13% of those who self-identify as “very conservative” and 12% of registered independent voters. Most encouraging, Johnson’s support among voters under the age of 30 is at 17%, which puts him just 10-points behind Mitt Romney.

Other recent surveys have had Johnson at 15% in New Mexico and 8% in Montana.

The attempt on Wallace’s life at the Laurel Shopping Center left the three-time presidential candidate paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life.

At the time of the shooting, the 52-year-old Wallace had accumulated more popular votes than any other Democratic candidate for president, including South Dakota Sen. George McGovern, the party’s eventual nominee.

Bremer had stalked President Richard M. Nixon in the weeks leading up to the assassination attempt on Wallace, traveling as far as Ottawa, Canada, where Nixon was scheduled to give a speech at Parliament Hill on April 14.  Unable to get close to Nixon, the troubled Milwaukeean — an unemployed janitor who had been diagnosed as a schizophrenic several months earlier — decided that it would be virtually impossible to assassinate Nixon and immediately set his sights on Wallace.

“I have to kill somebody,” Bremer confided in his diary.  “I am one sick assassin.”

Volunteering to work on Wallace’s campaign, Bremer — who had also been spotted at rally for former Vice President Hubert Humphrey on April 3 — traveled to Maryland to be close to the candidate’s campaign headquarters in Silver Spring.

Shortly after finishing his speech at the Laurel Shopping Center, Wallace — ignoring the advice of Secret Service agents — began to work the crowd estimated at more than 1,000 people.  In a matter of moments, Bremer, sporting dark sunglasses and a “Wallace in ’72” campaign button, stepped forward, pulled out a .38 revolver and opened fire on the Alabama governor, emptying his weapon before quickly being subdued.

Hit in the abdomen and chest with a bullet lodged in his spine, Wallace fell to the ground, gasping for air.  Hit four times at close range, it’s remarkable that he survived.  Three others were also wounded, including an Alabama state trooper who served as Wallace’s personal bodyguard, a female campaign volunteer and a U.S. Secret Service agent assigned to protect the governor.

Wallace, who had been leading in the polls prior to the shooting, rolled to an easy victory in Maryland the following day, garnering 219,687 votes to Humphrey’s 151,981 and McGovern’s 126,978.  He also won big in Michigan, nearly doubling McGovern’s second-place showing in that state.

But, for all intents and purposes, the assassination attempt ended Wallace’s dreams of capturing the Democratic nomination in 1972.  Poorly represented by surrogates in the half-dozen remaining primaries, the ailing Alabama governor could do no better than a couple of second-place finishes and a half-hearted write-in effort in California’s winner-take-all primary on June 6.  

Wallace received 381 and 7/10 votes at the Democratic national convention in Miami Beach later that summer, all but 54 having been earned prior to the May 15 shooting.

Bremer, who served thirty-five years of a 53-year sentence for the attempt on Wallace’s life, was released from prison in November 2007 and remains on probation until 2025.

Wallace, who died in 1998 at the age of 79, forgave his assailant eight years after the shooting.  Acknowledging that Bremer had “interrupted a lot my plans politically,” Wallace said that he was much happier since personally forgiving the man who had left him crippled for life.

Buddy Roemer

The deadline for a candidate to secure the support required in order to move forward in the Americans Elect nominating process has now passed, with no candidate coming even close to the required threshold. Former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer made a frantic last minute push, but fell far short of his goal.

Under Americans Elect rules, this should be the end of the line. However, it seems that the organization will attempt to field a ticket of some sort and will make a major announcement later this week as to the future of the AE process. Some have speculated that this will involve rolling out a simpler national online primary that would feature a handful of qualified candidates chosen by the board. Others think the organization may just nominate one of their own, former Comptroller David Walker.

The following is an official statement by Americans Elect CEO Kahlil Byrd:

Over the past two years, Americans Elect has focused on achieving three clear goals:

* Gaining nationwide ballot access for a third presidential ticket to compete in the 2012 race;
* Holding the first ever nonpartisan secure national online primary at AmericansElect.org; and
* Fielding a credible, balanced, unaffiliated ticket for the 2012 presidential race.

Through the efforts of thousands of staffers, volunteers, and leadership, Americans Elect has achieved every stated operational goal. Despite these efforts, as of today, no candidate has reached the national support threshold required to enter the “Americans Elect Online Convention” this June. (Read a detailed summary of the AE process here and the full rules here.)

Because of this, under the rules that AE delegates ratified, the primary process would end today. There is, however, an almost universal desire among delegates, leadership and millions of Americans who have supported AE to see a credible candidate emerge from this process.

Every step of the way, AE has conferred with its community before making major decisions. We will do the same this week before determining next steps for the immediate future. AE will announce the results of these conversations on Thursday, May 17.

As always, we thank everyone who has participated in this effort and will honor the work, efforts and trust so many people have placed in Americans Elect.

Stoner, who was suspected by prosecutors in as many as a dozen other bombings and had once been regarded by the FBI as a suspect in the slaying of Martin Luther King, Jr., had a long and varied history in right-wing fringe politics, beginning with his founding of a short-lived anti-Semitic party in 1946, a minor party whose goal was to “out-Hitler Hitler” by proposing to make Judaism a legal offense punishable by death.

Stoner, who had contracted polio when he was two years old and walked with a limp the rest of his life, was a longtime admirer of Mississippi’s Theodore G. Bilbo.  He was born in Tennessee, the son of a prosperous family.  His father owned and operated a sightseeing company on Lookout Mountain, the famous Civil War battle site overlooking Chattanooga.

Having avoided military service in World War II because of his noticeable limp, Stoner re-chartered a dormant chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Chattanooga when he was barely eighteen.

Along with Edward R. Fields, a young chiropractor who had been active in the nascent neo-Nazi movement as a teenager in Atlanta, Stoner later founded the National States Rights Party (NSRP) in 1958.  The NSRP, which attacked Jews with the same ferocity and hatred as it did integration, quickly absorbed a number of smaller entities on the far right, including John Kasper’s Seaboard White Citizen’s Council, Dewey Taft’s Conservative Party in Tampa, Florida, and several local Klan organizations.

Within two years of its founding, the virulently racist party was headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, “ground zero” in the civil rights struggle.

“Even within the context of the zany bestiary of racist right-wing politics that characterized much of Alabama’s political culture, this Dixie version of the Hitlerjugend careened over the edge,” observed Southern historian Dan Carter.

The National States Rights Party ran Orval E. Faubus of Arkansas for president in 1960, pairing the reluctant segregationist governor with Admiral John G. Crommelin — a one-time leader of the famed “Blue Angels” stunt-flying squadron and one of the party’s most fervent supporters — as his vice-presidential running mate.  Faubus declined the party’s presidential nomination, but his name remained on the ballot in Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware and Tennessee.

In addition to serving as the party’s longtime national chairman and publisher of the party’s newsletter, The Thunderbolt — a volatile mixture of Nazi-inspired anti-Semitism and white supremacy which was widely read by Klansmen and neo-Nazis alike — Stoner also served as the party’s nominee for vice president in 1964.

John Kasper, a longtime devotee of Ezra Pound, the controversial American expatriate poet who embraced fascism after moving to Italy in the early 1920s, headed the party’s ticket that year.  Once a symbol of defiance, Kasper, a surprisingly cultured individual who owned an automobile repair shop in Nashville, had twice been jailed for urging citizens in Clinton, Tennessee, to resist school integration in 1956.

Having forsaken an Ivy League education in philosophy and English, Kasper later sold his bookstores in New York and Washington to expose what he described as “the iron hand in the velvet glove which the federal government wielded for the first time in Clinton, Tennessee.”  Claiming no personal animosity toward African-Americans, he insisted that his fight against racial integration was really a struggle for adherence to the Constitution.

Like Orval Faubus four years earlier, the 35-year-old Kasper had serious misgivings about his own candidacy.  He didn’t actively campaign and hadn’t even bothered to attend the party’s national convention in Louisville in early March.  His heart, he explained in an October interview, was with Barry Goldwater.

“If I didn’t think it would have a detrimental effect,” he said, ”I would go out and make talks for Goldwater.”

Stoner, on the other hand, displayed no such reluctance and barnstormed the country looking for votes for his tiny National States Rights Party.  In the end, the Kasper-Stoner duo netted a negligible 6,953 votes in Arkansas, Kentucky and Montana.

In later years, the unreconstructed racist frequently ran for office as a Democrat, garnering more than 40,000 votes for the U.S. Senate in Georgia’s 1972 Democratic primary and 74,000 votes — or 10 percent — in an unsuccessful bid for lieutenant governor of the Peach State two years later.

Stoner, who eventually served three and a half years of a ten-year sentence for his role in the 1958 Birmingham bombing, was released from prison in 1986.  The rabble-rousing foe of integration waged his last political campaign in 1990 — four years after being paroled — when he garnered 3 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor.

While conceding defeat in his lifelong struggle against integration, Stoner remained defiant until the end, never apologizing for his racist and anti-Semitic views.  “Society has changed.  It was changed by defeat — defeat of the white people against race-mixing,” maintained the gaunt, partially-paralyzed and bedridden white supremacist a few months before his death on April 23, 2005.

Burnett couldn’t resist asking the silly question of which major party candidate Johnson would vote for if he weren’t running, to which Johnson replies that he would rather die. Hopefully if he continues to answer this way, people will stop wasting time by asking him the question again and again.